Ube, Yamaguchi

Coal dust and cement powder are long gone from the air, but the industrial spine of Ube still shows in the skyline — the port infrastructure, the company headquarters, the wide roads built for freight. This is a city that grew not from a castle town or a post road but from what lay underground: seams of coal discovered in the Meiji era that pulled a scattering of fishing villages into something abrupt and urban. The fishermen at Ube-misaki and Maruo harbors still bring in live kuruma ebi and tsukimachi-gani, and ubekamaboko is made from the same coastal catch, pressed and steamed in the old way.

The civic ambition that coal money once funded has left an unusual residue. The Watanabe-ō Memorial Hall, designed by Murano Tōgo and designated an Important Cultural Property, stands as a piece of serious modernist architecture — a concert hall in a medium-sized industrial city, which says something about what the town expected of itself. Tokiwa Park holds outdoor sculpture alongside a tropical plant pavilion, and the UBE Contemporary Japanese Sculpture Exhibition has brought large-scale works into the landscape at intervals for decades. Walking through the park, you pass steel and stone forms between the trees without ceremony, the way you might pass a bench.

Inland, the small district of Ono produces most of Yamaguchi Prefecture's green tea — Ono-cha, quiet and local. At Yoshibe, a cluster of massive quartz diorite boulders rises from the hillside, a designated natural monument that most visitors to the region never reach. Ube ramen is eaten at lunch counters rather than tourist spots. The city continues its industrial work without performing its own history.